Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/749

Rh either. Three tribes or peoples of them coexist here: Letts, Jmouds or Samogitians, and Lithuanians proper, as shown on our map. Contact with the Finnic-speaking peoples north of them—Esths, Livs, Tchouds, and Vods—has modified the purity of the Lettic speech considerably. These Finns, in turn, speak a language like that of the Magyars in Hungary, and the Basques, which is not European at all. It is similar in structure to the primitive languages of Asia and of the aborigines of America. It represents a transitional stage of linguistic evolution, through which the Aryan family has probably passed in earlier times. But the language of the Letto-Lithuanians, while primitive in many respects, bears no relation structurally to the Finnic; it is as properly Aryan as the speech of the Slavs.

The perfect monotony and uniformity of environment of the Russian people is most clearly expressed anthropologically in their head form. Our results are shown graphically, it is believed for the first time, by the accompanying map of cephalic index. The proportions of the head, as we have sought to prove in our previous papers, are to-day regarded as perhaps the most indubitable test of racial derivation for Europe, at least. The cephalic index is merely the breadth of the head in percentage of its maximum length from front to back. Thus a cephalic index of 82 means that the head is as broad as it is long. A rise of index implies an increasingly broad or short head. Low indexes mean long heads; high ones denote a round or bullet-shaped cranium. Of course, as we must reiterate, our indexes are merely the averages for great numbers of individuals. They express more or less roughly the central type toward which the populations as a whole tends.

Bearing in mind that the Poles and Letto-Lithuanians along the Baltic Sea are not Russians properly, and excluding, of course, the Tatars of the Crimea, a moment's consideration of our map shows at once a great similarity of head form prevailing all over Europe from the Carpathian Mountains east and north. The cephalic index oscillates but two or three points about a center of 82. This is about the head form of the northwestern French; appreciably